Alas, and I have spoken of her Muse— Her Muse, that died with her auroral dews! Learn, the wise cherubim from harps of gold Seduce a trepidating music manifold; But the superior seraphim do know None other music but to flame and glow. So she first lighted on our frosty earth, A sad musician, of cherubic birth, Playing to alien ears—which did not prize The uncomprehended music of the skies— The exiled airs of her far Paradise. But soon from her own harpings taking fire, In love and light her melodies expire. Now Heaven affords her, for her silenced hymn, A double portion of the seraphim. At the rich odours from her heart that rise, My soul remembers its lost Paradise, And antenatal gales blow from Heaven’s shores of spice; I grow essential all, uncloaking me From this encumbering virility, And feel the primal sex of heaven and poetry: And parting from her, in me linger on Vague snatches of Uranian antiphon. How to the petty prison could she shrink Of femineity?—Nay, but I think In a dear courtesy her spirit would Woman assume, for grace to womanhood. Or, votaress to the virgin Sanctitude Of reticent withdrawal’s sweet, courted pale, She took the cloistral flesh, the sexual veil, Of her sad, aboriginal sisterhood; The habit of cloistral flesh which founding Eve indued. Thus do I know her: but for what men call Beauty—the loveliness corporeal, Its most just praise a thing unproper were To singer or to listener, me or her. She wears that body but as one indues A robe, half careless, for it is the use; Although her soul and it so fair agree, We sure may, unattaint of heresy, Conceit it might the soul’s begetter be. The immortal could we cease to contemplate, The mortal part suggests its every trait. God laid His fingers on the ivories Of her pure members as on smoothèd keys, And there out-breathed her spirit’s harmonies I’ll speak a little proudly:—I disdain To count the beauty worth my wish or gaze, Which the dull daily fool can covet or obtain. I do confess the fairness of the spoil, But from such rivalry it takes a soil. For her I’ll proudlier speak:—how could it be That I should praise the gilding on the psaltery? ’Tis not for her to hold that prize a prize, Or praise much praise, though proudest in its wise, To which even hopes of merely women rise. Such strife would to the vanquished laurels yield, Against _her_ suffered to have lost a field. Herself must with herself be sole compeer, Unless the people of her distant sphere Some gold migration send to melodise the year. But first our hearts must burn in larger guise, To reformate the uncharitable skies, And so the deathless plumage to acclimatise: Since this, their sole congener in our clime, Droops her sad, ruffled thoughts for half the shivering time.